Bliss

Greetings,

Nature is what you can be. Culture is what you are.

Two French women arrived at the Blissful Guesthouse in Kampot. Kampot is famous for pepper, old French colonial buildings along a river flowing to the sea and packs of roving wild vicious dogs, mongrels and starving, desperate canines.

One said, "Hello." A traveler in the shade of waving sunsplashed ferns said, "Welcome to paradise."

"Is this paradise?"

"Paradise is wherever you are."

One woman with a cloud of white hair smiled and said, "You give us a great power."

"You already have the power. You are a light warrior."

"We can talk about that later." 

"I am a now, not a later."

They went to reception. There were no rooms available. They wheeled their bags away, through the sand of time discussing life's vagaries in fluent French, laughing at the absurdity of it all with innate existential wisdom.

Metta.

 

Head work

Greetings,

Actual raw material.
Make it new day by day, make it new.
Am I this or am I dreaming?
Non-verbal energies and perspectives. 

Nature is what you can be, and culture is what you are.

Metta.

Julia wakes up in Cambodia

Greetings,

Julia is from Stockholm, Sweden. She is 36-years young. She was married for 10 long angry violent years to a Black man from Atlanta.

We met at a guesthouse in Siem Reap, Cambodia. She was a tight bundle of burning anxieties. 

She opened up. "I don't know what I'm running away from. I don't know what I'm running toward." We talked about the amazing passages inside Angkor temples, being an allegory of her travels.

- One door opens and one door closes but the passages can be a bitch, whispered a traveling ghost.

I suggested she'd evolved as a willing victim of old lies, how she'd believed the old lies from the authority figures (family, husband, boss, friends) in her life. How she'd believed, in her heart, the old controlling attitudes and belief systems of others. How her new day in Cambodia, this beginning, offered her new opportunities for awareness and growth.

Like other humans, to become real, she'd eventually face her deep multiple fears. Plural. It was either that or keep on running scared. Wild animals on her trail.

"I want to cut all my hair off." It was long curling blond movie star mane quality hair. We went to a salon. She was naturally nervous. She swallowed hard. A woman cut it off. Julia felt lighter and more free. She altered her outward appearance, releasing old anxieties.

By cutting her hair with bright shiny silver scissors, a complete symbolic gesture, Julia realized how she felt was more important than how her stone cold colleagues back in stone cold freezing Sweden might react. It was a small significant step on her new path. 

One day Julia went far away to see, hear, touch, taste, and feel a temple's influence on her consciousness.

She visited My Grandfather's House and the village school. She bought them a water purifier. She bought them a battery so they'd have lights after dark.

Another day, returning from temples she stopped in a village and met some children.

The next morning she invited me to join her. We stopped at a shop where she purchased bags of toothbrushes and toothpaste. We rolled through the flat countryside passing simple bamboo homes, women selling, cooking, cleaning, washing and working. We were far away from the big bright town filled with happy white tourists doing Angkor.

Julia talked a blue streak...unloading all her honesty, hopes, and dreams well mixed with anxieties and fears.

"I feel good doing this," she said. "I've never done anything like this before. My past life was all about anger. It was shit. Way too many problems and conflicts. Now that I'm in Cambodia, what, less than a week, I'm beginning to learn about myself, seeing how my life was empty with no meaning. How it was all about pleasing others, buying useless things to make myself feel better."

We turned off the paved road onto a thin dirt track leading to a bamboo thatched home on stilts in a field. Half-naked kids played. Old women and men sat in the shade. Julia met the kids and a young mother.

"Here," she smiled, handing them toothbrushes and paste, "these are for you." The kids and mothers were amazed. An 80-year old woman, a former Apsara dancer performed some quick movements.  Julia copied her to the delight of everyone.

We left. "I'll be back," Julia yelled as kids ran behind waving. 

"I now feel more fulfilled," she said. We stopped in a small market village for coffee. Young girls selling small colorful bamboo paper birds descended on us. "Buy something?" 

Julia met Rita, second from the right. Rita's 14 and in the 5th grade. Rita learned her English selling to foreigners at the temples after school. "I saw a leader in the girl's eyes," Julia said as we rode back to the city. "Maybe I can help her, get an English teacher for her village. Give her an opportunity to really grow."

The short version is that Julia had to modify her dream for the girl. "Let's be practical," I suggested. Finding a Khmer English teacher for $80 a month was like finding clean drinking water.

The next day Julia bought a brand new pink bike for Rita. A bell, basket, the works. It said, 'NEW STAR' on the chain guard. We went to a bookstore and she bought a whiteboard, boxes of markers and 20 basic English books, picture dictionaries and story books. We loaded them on a tuk-tuk and rolled to the village. 

Rita, her family - they raise pigs, dad kills them, mom sells the meat in the market, older sisters hustle wealthy tourists hoping to get a boyfriend and get out - and friends were waiting for Julia.

"Here, Rita all this is for you," said Julia. "The bike will help you get to school, the temples and home. The whiteboard, markers and books will help you teach English here." Rita smiled. "Thank you."

Rita jumped on her bike and pedaled through dust, broken leaves, around the house. Julia spread the books out and all the kids explored new images, words, ABC alphabets and color. Julia exchanged email and postal addresses with Rita. 

"I feel real good about this," Julia said as we rolled through Cambodia. "Real good. I've made a small difference in a young girl's life. I am so grateful."

Metta.

Julia and kids...

No cars today

Greetings,

Today is Sunday. It is the quiet second day of Chinese New Year. 

I pedal my bike into Siem Reap for iced coffee. It's cold and delicious. Men play chess slapping wooden pieces while talking, gesticulating at high decibels. Kick boxers on a screen pummel each other with knees and gloves and violent fury to the endless delight of invisible millions. 

Idle men with their backs to the river sit in the shade of empty white tourist vans waiting for business. 

I pedal across a bridge over a wide brown river bisecting the town. I go to a car wash business with a small restaurant. I discovered this place one day by chance. The woman owner is pleasant and happy. She has high cheekbones. She is pregnant with her second child. She employes four kitchen kids and six for the car wash. 

Her husband is a driver. He sleeps in a green net hammock. His wife plays cards with all the workers. They cannot afford to go home to see family.

Usually the car wash business is busy with two high open raised bays for cars. 

Today it is empty. I eat a simple meal of wide egg noodles, carrots, bamboo shoots, pork and eggs.
(Eats, Shoots & Leaves)  amphibology—a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous grammatical construction.

One car wash boy lays his one white shirt on the rusty brown cement platform. He wears a brown sarong towel. He scrubs the shirt with a bar of soap. He turns on the high pressure car hose blasting white flying soap from the shirt. He rinses it. 

He does all his laundry. He walks over to a standing metal rack, shakes out his only best shirt and hangs it up. He carefully adjusts the collar, buttoning the top button. He slaps water out of a yellow t-shirt, small towel, another dark shirt and hangs them.

He owns two pairs of long dark pants.  He turns them inside out, putting them on hangers where they will dry quickly in the tropical heat. He disappears behind a green plastic screen to his room for a nap, enjoying his day off. No cars today.

Metta.

Mine

Greetings,

Here I am. I communicate my reality to the world. 

Do you like my shirt? Can you read words or do you need a picture? How about a picture of a picture?

I don't know how to read so I like to look at pictures. 

My country has 11.5 million people and maybe 6-10 million mines. Adults say there are 40,000 amputees in my country. Many more have died because we don't have working medical facilities.

Mines are cheap. A mine costs $3.00 to put in the ground and $1,000.00 to take out of the ground. I'm really good at numbers.

Talk to me before you leave trails to explore the forest. It's beautiful and quiet. I know all the secret places.

I showed my picture to a Cambodian man and he didn't like it ;-(

They call this denial. He said it gave him nightmares. So it goes.

My village is my world. Where do you live?

Metta.

Cambodian Land Mine Museum...

Landmines in Cambodia...